“Cuz we could move there,” Dill enthused wildly, “and then I bet school doesn’t start for another two weeks in Japan, so then we could move there, and just keep traveling around the world to the next place where school doesn’t start for two weeks, until we wind up back here in the summer.”
Peter squinted at him. “That’s insane.”
“No, man, it’ll work. You know how somewhere in the world, it’s always night? Like, it’s night in
“Yeahhhh…” Peter agreed, waiting for Dill’s bizarro logic to kick in.
“Well, there’s probably always someplace in the world where school doesn’t start for two weeks. We just gotta find it, over and over and over again. Man, I am good.
Peter laughed. “I don’t think my Mom’ll let me go back.”
“What about your dad?”
A long pause. “I haven’t seen my dad for a couple of years.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Peter shrugged. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay, but Peter knew that’s what you said in these circumstances.
“Dads are highly overrated,” Dill continued. “My dad basically just comes home from work, yells at me, goes to sleep on the couch, and stinks up the bathroom.”
“Ewww, gross.”
“Hey, I tell it like I smell it.” Dill shifted his weight, and gazed past Peter’s shoulder. “You think you can get me inside your house?”
“Uh, sure, I guess. Why?”
“I wanna see inside. But he can’t know about it, okay?”
“Your dad?”
“Well, him, too, but I meant your grandfather.”
“Why?”
Dill bit his lip. “There was…an accident.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I kind of lit his garden on fire last year,” Dill explained.
“WHAT?”
“It was an accident. I was trying to scare something out of there. Didn’t work so good.”
A thrill of fear gripped Peter’s chest. “Scare what out?”
Dill looked to the right and the left, as though he were afraid of who might be listening.
“There’s something weird going on in his garden at night,” Dill whispered. “Especially the watermelon patch. That’s what I lit on fire. Well, first I lit the corn, but the watermelon patch was right next to it. You ever seen a watermelon explode?”
“No.”
“It’s coooool.” Dill grinned, eyes wide. Then he stopped grinning. “But it’s reeeeaaaally messy. And LOUD. You can’t exactly hide watermelons exploding.”
“What were you trying to scare out?”
“I don’t know, exactly…but I can show you tonight.”
What in the world was Dill talking about? A stray dog? A bear? His voice was way too spooky and low for it to be some normal kind of animal.
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Copyright © 2008 Darren Pillsbury. All rights reserved.
2 comments:
Now I wanna see a watermelon explode...! I suppose I'll have to google it. Gonna be so disappointed if I don't find a youtube video or summat...!
Oh, and enjoying it so far btw...
Okay, now I want the story fast so I'm skipping the video...life is full of hard choices.
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